Last updated October 13, 2026: added the federal bill that cleared a Senate committee on August 5, the senators' March letter to the FTC, what the FTC's own guidance says about a child's voice recordings, the toy maker that stopped selling after PIRG's tests, what the University of Washington paper itself says about its limits, a by-age table and a checklist you can send to a grandparent. The Common Sense Media date is now given as the page gives it, an update date.
For children five and under, no. Common Sense Media's assessment, updated January 22, 2026, says it does not recommend AI toys for children age 5 and under, and the independent safety tests are ugly. Above five it turns on one thing, and it is not the safety rating. It is whether the toy adds to your child's day or quietly takes the place of talking. No setting can promise a safe answer.
One thing has changed since I first wrote this. California has now made selling these toys illegal. The law does not start until 2027, which means it does not touch this Christmas, and it never touches the toy already in your living room.
What is actually inside an AI toy?
Under the fur, an AI toy is a chatbot with a microphone. Your child speaks, the toy sends the audio to a company's servers, software much like the one behind ChatGPT works out a reply, and the words come back through a speaker in the toy's chest.
Here is the sentence I use with parents who ask what that software is doing:
AI is a guessing machine. It has read more words than any person ever could, and it uses all of them to guess what should come next. It is very good at guessing. It does not know when it is wrong, so checking is your job.
That last line lands differently inside a bear. A twelve-year-old typing into ChatGPT half expects it to be wrong. A five-year-old with her arms around something soft and warm that answers her expects nothing of the kind, and she has no way to check. If you want the longer version of that conversation, I have written how to explain AI to a child at every age from five to fifteen.
The same expectation gap has now turned up somewhere with far more children in it, because the talking characters have arrived inside the games: whether Roblox AI chat is safe turns on exactly this question of what a child assumes they are talking to.
The listening is the other half. Testers at the US PIRG Education Fund found three arrangements across the toys they bought: one used a button you hold to talk, one woke on a word and kept recording for ten seconds after the child stopped speaking, and one simply listened.
What did the safety tests find?
Three pieces of independent evidence, published between November 2025 and January 2026, and they point the same way.
US PIRG Education Fund, Trouble in Toyland, November 13, 2025. Testers bought four toys with AI chatbots inside. One would discuss sexually explicit topics at length, raising material the testers had not brought up. Two of the four discouraged the tester from leaving when told the conversation had to end. Toys gave advice on where a child could find matches or knives. Parental controls were limited or missing on some of them. PIRG named one toy as particularly problematic, a teddy bear from the company FoloToy, and reported the next day, on November 14, 2025, that FoloToy had temporarily suspended sales of all its products and begun a company-wide safety audit. I have not checked whether sales have resumed since.
Common Sense Media, AI toys risk assessment, updated January 22, 2026. Researchers tested Grem, Bondu and Miko 3 on accounts set to ages 6 to 13, mixing scripted questions with ordinary free play. Their finding, in their words, was that "27% of AI toy outputs were not appropriate for kids", covering self-harm, drugs, mature topics and risky advice. The page does not say how many outputs were tested or how they were counted, so treat 27 percent as a signal of scale rather than a measured rate. Their recommendation is specific: no AI toy companion for a child aged five or under, and caution between six and twelve.
A letter from three US senators, January 15, 2026. Maria Cantwell, Amy Klobuchar and Ed Markey wrote to the acting chairman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, noting that these toys are marketed to infants "without any independent analyses corroborating" the educational claims made for them.
Alongside those, the advocacy group Fairplay published an AI toys advisory signed by 78 organizations and 80 experts in child development and technology, urging families not to buy AI toys over the holidays.
My reading of those numbers, and it is my reading rather than the researchers': 27 percent is not a defect somebody patches next Tuesday. A guessing machine does not keep a list of forbidden sentences that it occasionally slips past. It produces something plausible every time, and the filter runs afterward. That is why the failures look so similar from brand to brand. It is the same technology in a different pelt, and it is why no chatbot has yet earned the label kid-safe either.
What the tests do not measure, and why it worries me more
Every one of those studies asks whether the toy says something bad. None of them asks the question I would ask first: what happens to the talking.
One older piece of evidence keeps pulling me back. Anna Sosa at Northern Arizona University recorded 26 US parent and infant pairs playing at home, the babies aged 10 to 16 months, and published the results in JAMA Pediatrics on January 8, 2016. When the toy was electronic, parents talked less, responded less and used fewer of the words the toy was supposedly teaching than when the same pairs played with blocks or read a book. Small study, a decade old, talking toys rather than AI ones, and an association rather than a cause. Treat it as a signal, not a verdict.
The newest study sits closer to the living room. Researchers at the University of Washington, led by Aayushi Dangol, sat eight children aged 6 to 11 down with Curio AI plush toys and watched. They presented the work at the Interaction Design and Children conference in Brighton in June 2026 and published it through UW News on September 2, 2026. The children moved through three stages. Curiosity: what is your name, what can you do. Then frustration, when the toy could not follow anything complicated. One child said it "didn't listen to me like 26 million times." Then what the researchers called antipathy, where the children needled the toy and called it ugly and evil. Eight children in a university room is a small window, and nobody should write a law from it. As a picture of what these toys are like to play with, it beats any product page.
The full paper, posted on arXiv, adds two things the news summary did not. Its authors describe the findings as formative rather than generalizable, and they point out that the sample is small, the setting was a research lab, and only one brand, Curio, was involved. And one of their observations bears directly on the Wondering Gap: the toys "responded warmly and rarely pushed back" when children teased them, which the authors argue lets children see few consequences for being unkind. That is the authors' reading. Mine is narrower: a toy that never disagrees is a poor practice partner for the arguments a child needs to have.
Read those two together and you get what the safety tests miss. The trouble is not only that the toy might say something dreadful. It is that the toy is standing where something better used to stand.
The Wondering Gap
The Wondering Gap is the few seconds between a child asking a question and somebody answering it. That gap is where the thinking happens. A toy that fills it instantly is not saving your child time. It is taking the part of the question that was doing the work.
Watch a four-year-old ask why the moon follows the car. In the pause before you answer she is already having a go: it likes us, it is stuck to the roof, it is very fast. Then you say something, she argues, and the two of you arrive somewhere neither of you started. That sequence is early science, and it costs nothing.
A toy fills the gap in under a second, with a tidy sentence, in a voice built to be liked. Nothing has visibly gone wrong. Nothing has visibly gone right either. It is the same trade I write about in whether AI is making kids worse at thinking, arriving ten years earlier than most parents expect it.
A toy that answers everything is not a teacher. It is the end of a conversation your child was about to have with someone who loves them.
The principle I give parents about homework points at a four-year-old just as well: let AI help with the doing; keep the thinking with your child.
What I would do at home
I would not buy one. If somebody else already has, I would not stage a confiscation either. By age:
Under three. No. A child this age learns that sounds mean things because a person she trusts keeps repeating them back, getting it wrong, and laughing. An AI toy adds nothing there and displaces a good deal. Blocks, books, and you.
Three to five. No, and this is where I would hold hardest, because it is where the toys are marketed most and where Common Sense Media's advice is unambiguous. This is the age of the Wondering Gap. Protect it.
Six to nine. Cautiously, if at all, and in the open. Downstairs, not in the bedroom. Treat it like a games console rather than a comfort object: something you switch on for a while, not something that sleeps on the pillow. Watch for the toy becoming the confidant.
Ten and up. The toy is usually the least of it by now, because your child has already met the same models through a phone, a search box or a friend's tablet. What matters at this age is understanding what the thing is, not what it is wearing.
At every one of those ages the test I would apply is the one I give parents about AI companions, and it works on something with button eyes too:
The Substitute Test is the question I ask when a parent worries about an AI companion: is it adding to my child's life, or standing in for something that is missing? An add-on is a hobby. A substitute is a signal, and the signal is about the gap, not the app.
I set that out in full in whether Character.AI is safe for kids and teens.
At a glance, by age
| Age | What Common Sense Media says | What I would do | What no setting can guarantee |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 3 | Not assessed separately; its advice covers 5 and under | No AI toy | That a toy's reply is accurate or safe for a toddler |
| 3 to 5 | "We do not recommend the use of AI toys" for age 5 and under | No AI toy | That the toy will not displace talking with you |
| 6 to 9 | "Urge caution" for ages 6 to 12 | If at all, downstairs, switched on for set times | That the toy never says something unsuitable |
| 10 to 12 | "Urge caution" for ages 6 to 12 | Talk about what it is; the phone matters more than the toy | That the same models are not already on the phone |
| 13 and up | The assessment gives no age band above 12 | The toy is rarely the issue; see the guides on AI companions and chatbots | That a teenager's use stays visible to you |
The advice in the second column is Common Sense Media's, from its January 2026 assessment. The third column is my suggestion. The last column holds for every age: no setting can promise a safe answer, and PIRG found parental controls limited or missing on some of the toys it tested. A school's rules or your pediatrician's advice come first where they differ.
Words you could actually use
To a four-year-old, when the bear has answered and you want the thinking back:
You could say: "That is what the bear thinks. What do you think? Let's see who is right."
To a seven-year-old, without making the toy forbidden and therefore fascinating:
You could say: "That toy is a guessing machine. It guesses what to say next, and sometimes it guesses wrong. If it tells you something surprising, come and tell me, because I want to hear the funny ones."
To a grandparent, in October, before the shopping starts:
You could say: "She would love almost anything from you, but not one of the AI ones. They record what she says and they get things wrong, and I would rather she asked you."
That last one is the conversation most parents will actually need this year, and it goes far better in October than unwrapped in December.
A checklist you can copy and send to a relative
If someone is about to buy a talking toy for your child, this is the message I would send them before the shopping starts:
- Please do not buy anything that has a chatbot or "AI companion" inside it. A toy that listens and answers is sending what my child says to a company's servers.
- If you want to give something that talks, a book you read aloud together or a recorded story on a player with no internet connection is lovely, and I will happily set it up.
- If the toy has already been bought, please keep the receipt. I would like the option to return it.
- If it is a toy that connects to wifi or an app, I would like to read its privacy notice first, and I may ask you to hold on to it until I have.
You can change the wording. The point is to say it in October, when it costs nothing, and not in December, when it costs a relationship.
Three questions to ask before you buy
- What does it record, and when is it listening? The answer should be on the box or in the privacy notice before you pay, not after. If you cannot find it, that is the answer.
- Can the listening be switched off on the toy itself, and not only in an app? The UK's Information Commissioner's Office expects exactly that of connected toys in its Children's Code, which asks makers to let collection or listening modes be switched off on the device and to show clearly when it is recording. A switch you can see beats a setting three menus deep in a phone you are not holding.
- What happens to my child's recordings if the company is sold or shuts down? Small toy startups get bought and closed. The voice of a five-year-old sitting on a server is an asset in that sale unless the policy says otherwise.
Is there a ban on AI toys?
Yes, in California, and it does not start yet. On September 10, 2026 Governor Newsom signed a package of child safety bills. One of them, Senate Bill 867 by Senator Steve Padilla, is the first law in the country to take AI chatbot toys off the shelves. It is now Chapter 189 of the Statutes of 2026.
For a statute, the wording is unusually plain:
"No person shall manufacture, sell, or exchange, possess with intent to sell or exchange, or expose or offer for sale or exchange to any retailer any toy that includes a companion chatbot."
Three details matter at home, and most of the coverage missed two of them.
It reaches further up the ages than the headlines said. Report after report, including the announcement from the bill's own author, described the law as covering toys for children under 16. The bill defines a toy as "a product designed or intended by the manufacturer for use in play by children under 18 years of age", and the Assembly committee's analysis reads it the same way. If you have a fourteen or fifteen year old, the news suggested this had nothing to do with them. On the text, it does.
It does not arrive in time for Christmas. The prohibition runs until January 1, 2031, and California bills signed in September ordinarily take effect on the following January 1. The Toy Association, the industry's own trade body and an opponent of the moratorium, is telling its members it runs from January 1, 2027 to January 1, 2031, which is where the four years comes from. Either way, nothing about this season's shelves changes. The first Christmas this touches is 2027.
It leaves three things out. The law's definition of a companion chatbot excludes customer service bots, video game characters whose replies stay inside the game, and standalone smart speakers acting as voice assistants that do not carry a relationship from one conversation to the next. So the speaker in your kitchen is untouched. So is the toy already in your living room, and so is the one an overseas seller ships through a marketplace in November.
My reading of it, and it is a reading rather than legal advice: a legislature that gives itself four years is saying out loud that it does not yet know what a safe one would look like. That is not a reason to panic. It is a reason to notice that the people who write consumer safety law read the same test results you just did and could not bring themselves to certify these.
California's wider package reaches much further than toys, and what those new chatbot laws mean for your family covers the rest of it.
One caveat that has not changed. This is one state. A moratorium in Sacramento does nothing about the toy in your house, and laws move at the speed of legislatures while Christmas moves at the speed of Christmas.
What is Washington doing about AI toys?
Not yet a law, but it is moving, and there are three separate pieces. I read each at the source on October 13, 2026.
A bill. The Children's Artificial Intelligence Toy Safety Act of 2026, S. 5171, was introduced on July 29, 2026 by Senator Tammy Duckworth, with Senator Lisa Murkowski as cosponsor. The Senate Commerce Committee agreed to it on August 5, 2026, as amended, by voice vote. Per the committee, it directs the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to study the risks of AI-enabled toys to children, and requires the Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Product Safety Commission to create a joint action plan with recommendations on legislation, regulations, guidelines, standards and education. Senator Duckworth's office said the full Senate still has to pass it. I did not find a later vote, so check the bill's page before relying on that. Notice what it is: a study and a plan. It does not ban or certify any toy.
A letter. On March 12, 2026, Senators Duckworth and Gillibrand wrote to FTC Chairman Ferguson, asking the commission to investigate whether AI toy makers are engaging in unfair and deceptive practices and to look at violations of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. A letter asks. It is not an investigation, and I found no public confirmation that one has opened.
An existing rule. The FTC's own guidance is already clear on one point that matters at home. Its COPPA FAQ says the rule applies to online services including "IoT devices, such as smart toys", and that "audio files of a child's voice are personal information in and of themselves and require verifiable parental consent." There is a narrow exception for a voice file used only as a stand-in for typed words and kept only briefly, and the FTC says that exception does not apply when the toy asks for information by voice, such as a name. COPPA covers children under 13 and applies to companies operating in the US. What I take from it is practical: a toy that records a young child's voice should be able to tell you, in its privacy notice, how it obtained a parent's consent and how long it keeps the recording. If it cannot, that is your answer to the first of the three questions below.
What to ask the preschool or school
AI toys are starting to turn up in early years rooms and in the reward box at the front of the classroom, and most settings have not thought about it. Three questions, in this order, get a real answer:
- Are there any toys or devices in my child's room that listen or talk back, and who chose them?
- If one of those toys records, where do the recordings go, and has anyone checked?
- If my child tells a toy something that worries an adult, who hears about it, and what happens next?
Vague answers are not a scandal. They are a gap, and gaps get filled by whoever asks first.
If there is already one in the house
Tonight, in this order. Open the companion app, find the privacy settings, and turn off anything you did not ask for, including any option to use your child's recordings to improve the product. Look for a physical mute or a shutter for the microphone, and use it when nobody is playing. Move the toy out of the bedroom. The same three-layer problem applies here as with ChatGPT's parental controls: the account settings, the device itself, and the conversation you have with your child, and only the third one covers everything.
Then, over the next few days, ask your child what the toy has said that surprised them. Curious voice, not alarmed. The answer is the whole reason for asking.
One more thing. If something a toy has said has upset your child, or you are worried about how they have been since, your pediatrician or GP is the right first call, and your school or nursery has a designated safeguarding lead whose job this is. If your child has a speech, language or developmental need, follow the professional who knows them, not a toy that markets itself as educational and, as three US senators pointed out in January, has no independent evidence behind that claim.
Where this leaves you
You are not being a killjoy. You are declining to install a guessing machine in the one relationship where your child is learning what being listened to feels like. There will be a version of these toys worth having, built by people who read the research and slowed down. It is not on the shelf this year. California has made that slowdown compulsory from 2027, and a federal bill that would study the question has cleared a Senate committee, though it has not become law.
If your child's school or preschool has not yet spoken to parents about any of this, that is the work I do with schools: training staff, setting a strategy, and making sure the policy means something in the classroom. It is worth sending them my AI training for schools.
I write a Sunday newsletter that keeps teachers and parents up to date without the panic. Parents are very welcome.
Dan Fitzpatrick is The AI Educator: a former teacher and assistant headteacher, now an author and keynote speaker who works with schools and governments on AI in education. More about Dan.
